Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Without these emotional reflexes, rarely conscious but often terribly powerful, we would scarcely be able to function. "Most decisions we make have a vast number of possible outcomes, and any attempt to analyze all of them would never end," says University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. "I'd ask you to lunch tomorrow, and when the appointed time arrived, you'd still be thinking about whether you should come." What tips the balance, Damasio contends, is our unconscious assigning of emotional values to some of those choices. Whether we experience...
...distribution of books was Harvard's introduction to Danny Siegel, a poet, author, scholar, social activist and Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel guest for the weekend...
Except perhaps the bank. Crichton's 1995 entertainment earnings, according to Forbes magazine, amounted to $22 million--not from principal, not from interest, but just from words he thought up himself. His remuneration casts a consequential shadow, but the author isn't comfortable talking about it. He would sooner cogitate on those literary niggles--the charges that his characters have no depth. Back as far as The Andromeda Strain, Crichton concedes, he wasn't much for delving into character ("It didn't matter who the people were"). Still, he's human: criticism stings. "You know, I'm not very well...
Actually, the author's first New York City apartment in the 1950s was a walk-down: the "back half of a basement" with one room and a toilet down the hall. There this shy, Catholic girl from a small town in Rhode Island would sit "cross-legged on my studio couch, Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the phonograph" and feel "joy exploding in my chest. Because from this house I emerge every morning into the place my father promised would be mine one day. The place where there'd be lots of people like...
Crichton's other major excursion into cutting-edge science involves the trendy field of complexity theory, as translated by the author's mathematician caricature, Ian Malcolm. Building on chaos theory, the big thing of the 1980s, complexity theory argues that groups of randomly operating independent units--amino acids floating in primordial seas, humans acting in their own interests, populations of animals--can spontaneously and without outside direction organize themselves into complex systems--self-reproducing DNA molecules, functioning economies, social groups...